assuming that that's good news you know good good news reporting we are getting that from several sources but once again this the story has been all over the place but back to the war on terror the so-called war on terror is is which this is brought i think a reasonable discussion forward is it a geo political campaign or is it a domestic law enforcement issue that was one of the big debates after nine eleven you know this is an act of war or is this to act is this cross let's ask our guest in tonight's bigger picture national security panel right now i'm joined by michael breen sophia director of truman national security project center for national policy talk. show hid batar executive director with the bill of rights defense committee and corey saylor national legislative director at the council on american islamic relations thank you all for joining us tonight even in trying to stop coughing here producing. most of the media actually first of all

i'm curious show head to in your thoughts is it possible for us to fight terrorism without infringing on civil liberties absolutely and there are any number of novel policy solutions that the policy establishment hasn't even quite frankly seriously considered domestic agricultural policy right and subsidies for corporate agribusiness have a huge role in facilitating food insecurity in the developing world and this phenomenon of growing more corn for instance than we can possibly use dumping it below the cost of production in other countries driving their indigenous food production out of the market and then runners them subject to commodity price shocks and that's a recipe across human history for instability and revolution textile tariffs right we have a more favorable regime with respect to textile imports from the caribbean than we do from central asia and that's ridiculous from a security standpoint but nobody thinks about textile tariffs they were counterterrorism lens or agricultural policy or for that matter our millet. right

even before the arab spring i think it that people didn't think so much about our propensity to arm dictators abroad and that's probably the single worst thing we can do if we're struggling to win a battle for hearts and minds it's makes perfect sense michael to what extent do you think the blowback effect is you know we've we've. apparently decentralized. but. to what extent is our drone policy and and the policies that we just had this report come out last week saying that yes we committed torture. we committed crimes war crimes and that was the co number deal with the number two guy in the the co whatever the leader of the report and he's an old republican hard core over two or three in the defense department during the bush administration i mean serious. concern the guy who went into it saying take a lot to convince me or they did to what extent of we. use that lousy better for

the shot ourselves in the foot with this sure but my introduction to this is is primarily you know came in the form of be an army officer in iraq and afghanistan one of the first things you learn on the battlefield whatever that battlefield looks like is that every action you take is going to have a consequence and that you were in a long term you know war is really difficult out of those things and whether you're up against you know a couple of small a couple of people in a law enforcement situation or europe against a thinking enemy who means you harm and in whatever sense it's a tit for tat game that goes on for a long time the decisions you make are going to have ramifications how you conduct yourself and a thinking adversary is going to react to all those decisions. i think we've known for a long time and it's been acknowledged in a new way recently as you say that unfortunately we didn't gauge and torture and that many of the things that this country do in response and their security professionals did in response to nine eleven for counterproductive meanwhile many of the things that they did did. i have positive impacts but i want to be really

clear about this question of of a global war on terror and what that is. terrorism terrorism emotion and terrorism is a tactic. i think we have found ourselves in a global conflict against an organization al qaeda which has changed among others but does the core of the organization and the organization has changed in response to our actions it's changed because we've targeted effectively it's changed because it's found that certain ways of organizing and communicating are more effective against us than others and so as we've evolved they have evolved along alongside us that conflict continues to be real i have no idea of what's going on in boston today and i grew up near boston in most my families in law enforcement my dad works in the city even this is personal for me and in a way that i know it's personal for a lot of people you know their hearts go out to the people in boston is as we wish the best for the men and women in law enforcement in the security community or even right now trying to resolve the situation. we don't know what the motivations of

these two young men were we don't know who else they may have been informed by or working with we don't know if this has anything to do with al qaeda or associated organizations so it's really important keep that in mind too yes but but all that and not even making this about poised making this about this larger concept of declaring a war on terror. should we should we in fact you know let me toss this to you corey if i if i may should we be rethinking the whole concept of how we react to other actors around the world whether they're state actors or whether they're non-state actors who are. who are reacting to us or who are acting against us in ways that we perceive as threats or as as dangers and we have the old fashioned world war two model japan bombs us we go over we take out japan and of war. the world is changing in a whole variety of ways and we've historically done a lot of these thing. in

a kind of semi sneaky way ok let's let's subvert the government on doris for the benefit of the pineapple company or something you know that you know so what kind of policies should we be looking at i want to go back to what you said in your opening because it was really important should we treat this as a global issue of should we treat this is a law enforcement issue and first and foremost particularly with what's going on in boston right now they murdered two women and an eight year old boy and now apparently at least one more police officer right that is a law enforcement issue if we make it anything beyond that we are essentially handing a small victory to them because they want to be seen as someone who can disrupt our society set us off course so we have to call them what they are they're murderers and of story now and so far as changing our politics around the world the most important thing that i always believe that the united states can do is if we are going to talk about certain principles and values that we have we must project

those to the world i would say in the time since nine eleven unfortunately too often we have projected our fears rather than our values so when we talk about we believe that everyone should have democracy that people should have democratic institutions we have to put our money where our mouth is and help build those even though sometimes we don't like the results that we see those populations choosing for themselves but we have never i mean we've used that rhetoric for a long long time that's the can yeah and yet we we helped bring the shah back we have you know we helped install. saddam hussein we helped pinochet come to power we help you know overthrow or kill. and we are going to fight our wars for us in the proxy war and then as soon as it was over we walked away and left two years right. so so nothing i mean nothing that's

happened justifies boston but we do have to think about what it's like for the people we've left behind and the people that are subjected to some of these missteps that we've taken and we have to rethink about how is it that we can make sure that we keep our friends in those areas we've been as our friends particularly in iraq where it's very important to show he had the japanese have been actually quite good at this there are among the world's largest givers of foreign aid very often they do in a way that works to their benefit here's some money please buy our products but. it is there so is there a lesson for us to learn and how we're interacting with the rest of the world i think absolutely and just to pick up on corey's point one of the particular elements to this debate that i think is really interesting and really looked at are the roles that our own agencies play in fomenting and perpetuating conflict and i think the cia is a great agency to look at here and the entire history since nine eleven is i think uncontroversially the cia's fault right i mean they trained the precursors to al

qaeda in afghanistan the fight the soviets in the eighty's if we hadn't done that this genie would never have gotten out of the bottle and you know people debate about whether or not that was necessary to destabilize the u.s.s.r. what have you but the point is you know that the cia essentially responsible for the threat to which our society is what it is on if they want to actually run this i have to tell you i think it's a tremendous leap to lay. nine eleven and the decade of wars we've experienced since at the feet of the central intelligence a little fifty percent interest it is it is easy to sit here and tick off a litany. examples of american actions in the world and not worked out well it's easy to do that but would know what is going to lie and what is a canard to the mighty rio thought agreement had we not had a policy since the thirty's that was based on middle eastern oil regardless of how bad or good we played it out that we wouldn't have had the situation i think there's no question. that our need for oil or single source dependence on oil as

a single source of transportation fuel has security ramifications and has for a long time increasingly that's true as global demand increases even as american demand stays sadek and even as we produce more and more oil does that make sense i mean this is one of obama's one of osama bin laden's demands was that the you know who are concerned i think tom i got to tell you it's a long way from that to saying that the fact that we burn oil for transportation and that that has national security medications is the single explanation for all that has happened in the middle east or for nine eleven i think to i just don't i think that if the principal export of iran and iraq and afghanistan and saudi arabia and a lot of gas etc that region had been you know pineapples or bed bugs. would have been i would generally agree with you but the hole in the bottom of the bucket is that you know latin america's primary exports are you know include some of the agricultural products you mentioned pineapples certainly bananas right we've had plenty of illegitimate interventions there i mean you mentioned a and a and

pinochet did you know under escort amala nicaragua right i mean philip i mean let's not forget we're talking about a nation that entered the world stage in a really big way. through world war two right we're talking about a nation who fairly uniquely in human history followed up the largest military victory achieved by anybody ever in that war with the largest democracy development and human rights building project in the history of humanity the marshall plan absolutely and we built japan and articulated a global grand strategy that was primarily about extending freedom and opportunity to others and imperfectly executed strategy in a grand strategy i'll tell you that when we have departed from that we have suffered and so have others for the good that is good about all of this sure we do well we've done it when we've done it well many many times since then i think we also ignored our peril the reality that no matter what actions we took. there are elements in the world and there are people in the world i have met some of these

people. who unconditionally. and not because of some policy or wish death and hormones i remember that i don't doubt that and so let's not lose that as we sit here and come up with all of the different things we may have done in south america or in the thirty's that ten or not all of those people and not all of those people are outside. and i'd like to get to that conversation right after this break more upsides bigger picture panel discussion on national security.

will. suffer technology innovation all the list of elements from around russia we've. covered a potentially deadly blizzard taking aim for the northeast it's expected to hit stunning in a few hours from new york to maine we have team coverage of the storm. but what we're watching is the very heavy snow moving into boston proper earlier today it was very sticky you can see it start to become much more powdery down the line there's still a lot of snow out here a good place for snowball fight. piece and it is kind of a pretty incredible day there and even record snowfall throughout much of it might still be slugged three drugs listen something more urgency here.

the. international airport in the very heart of moscow. welcome back to tonight's bigger picture discussion on national security i'm joined by michael brain executive director at the truman national security project in the center for national policy show him which our executive director with the bill of rights defense committee and corey saylor national legislative director of the council on american islamic relations and let's get back to it while the media is

mostly focusing on islamic terrorism next external exposure you know extremists threats and whatever and we've been discussing this foreign policy international policy we are probably right here at home where we've had a history of problems right here at home you know from from the unabomber kind of thing to the oklahoma city bombing to the atlantic's bombing in to the whole cause museum shooting to the to the sikh temple a tax court of the southern poverty law center the quote the number of conspiracy minded anti-government quote patriot groups on the american radical right recent all time high in two thousand and twelve the fourth consecutive year of powerful growth and so i'm curious let me start with you corey on this one of the. one of the things we spoke a number of times with with the people from the southern poverty law center and others who are compiling these kind of stats and one of the things. it seems to be driving this is this is the first time

a black man has occupied the white house aide so there's a racism element to it be we've had thirty two years now of a drumbeat basically since reagan became the first president ever to say bein the president is an evil thing you know the government is not the solution the government is the problem. of thirty two years of a drumbeat of. in some cases both political parties saying government is a bad thing and people are starting to believe it. what what's your sense of this what do we do about this where is this going and where has this come from. as you set the table appropriately i mean as as you point out really the southern poverty law center and organizations like the council on american islamic relations started you know we were seeing sort of leveling off and anti muslim hate two thousand and seven two thousand and eight then you get the election of president obama and all of a sudden things start going on the rise again southern poverty law center has talked about you know in the expansion in white supremacist and anti-government groups

while we've been tracking an expansion an anti muslim and islam phobic groups. at this point in time you know it's a cycle that unfortunately we go through every so often and we believe that what needs to happen and the focus as you say is on islamic extremism and we know right we don't know in boston right now in boston what the motivation was these could have just been to people who wanted to see what happened although the evidence looks fairly convincing that they were inspired by groups by like al qaida. but we need to make sure that we don't take our eye off the ball so right now much of our security apparatus is centered around looking at. looking at muslims and we have one guy in the department of homeland security whose job it is to look at right wing extremists seriously you i was a one guy had a discussion recently at the center for american progress and what they were

talking about is particularly since the report that came out i think it was two thousand and nine the disgust from the department of homeland security that discussed the growth in the right wing group they had to withdraw because the write history was stripped down and they were saying at that discussion that there is now one person whose job it is to look at far right extremism or white supremacist extremism anti-government extremism so. if we're completely focused on extremism emanating from a minority religion and i'm not saying that there needs to be a concern about that absolutely i'm saying i'm saying that clearly but given that over the last two years this is the first casualty of casualty attack that has occurred apparently on the basis of muslim extremism we need to keep our eye on the right wing as well the white supremacist groups the anti muslim the anti-government groups because. right now they're operating in essentially

a safe space they're being allowed to go about what they're doing and that leads to very relevant concerns about the type of attacks that they can carry out so the scrutiny needs to be placed on them shut it in my lifetime i've been around of a while and i've seen arc of history in america that's fairly interesting and what really stirred up the john birch society i remember the the billboards of peach errol or warren in the late fifty's early sixty's and that really led to a crescendo that i think. we saw in dallas in one nine hundred sixty three. in some ways and at least there was a big ad the newspaper that day you know the drip to black you know welcome mr president details. and it was no welcome. the. a lot of that track back to brown v board that was that was earl warrens great crime and it's like things stir these folks up this this being racial integration and then you know it

kind of slowed down a little bit and life got back to normal or we got busy with other things the vietnam war and whatnot the government seems to work ok and then president obama comes into office is cory was pointing out now the hornet's nest has been poked again as it were. we were talking before about how we deal with external threats or people who are hostile to the united states based on perceived wong's how do we deal with people within the united states who are hostile to the united states based on perceived wrongs if you even when those perceived wrongs are in the minds of most americans extraordinarily illegitimate race is. one of the issues where we have a bill of rights for a reason it includes the right to speak for instance right when you start talking about assaults hate crimes would think that the criminal law deals adequately with those situations the tendency in the. incentive let's say to turn everything into

an act of terror right in order to promote it i think does what corey was saying before and critically does the work that our enemies would want to do on their behalf we have criminal law for a reason it's adequate to meet the need even in the counterterrorism context if you compare article three federal courts with the military status review tribunals or guantanamo bay we actually have convictions from federal courts and the contrived military commission system is wallowing in this procedural confusion or the trying to invent law from whole cloth and doing a extraordinarily bad job of it so that the criminal law paradigm works for even these issues and these aren't actually new issues people think that terrorism is a oh you know it started on nine eleven and let's be frank now our nation was born from an act of terrorism right that's what the boston tea party was and this i british exactly and that's my point precisely and so this notion of the newness of this phenomenon is profoundly a historical and i do i dare say ignorance you know our founders contemplated

precisely these questions and they adopted robust protections for individual rights for a reason that we would not trade liberty for security and we have done precisely that and we have ended up with neither and i think that that's the most tragic shame of the last decade and even beyond the discrete assaults that we saw in boston this week in new york and d.c. twelve years ago and if i could just put a punctuation mark on that when you mention article three courts you know. so many people watching may not know what that is the first three articles the constitution are the first to the house and senate you know closest to the people the first among equals the second is the presidency of the executive branch and the third is the judiciary so when you say in article three court what you're talking about just a normal all american court authorized by the constitution as opposed to a military court that operates under the uniform code of military justice or something about that goes to article three courts are hardly pro defendants right mean we live in the. saya t. that imprisons more people than any other on the planet including our you know

large nemesis china that has four times our population and if you think about the way the courts interact with the executive branch in the war on terror it's profoundly deferential just earlier this year the supreme court said we won't even consider claims against the national security agency's warrantless wiretapping scheme because we're just going to defer to executive secrecy so it's not as if choosing the article three courts is somehow you know some namby pamby alternative to real courts i mean article three courts are very deferential to the executive branch still secure convictions when the evidence is present in terrorism cases in this idea of and you know throwing the constitutional baby out with the counterterrorism bathwater to invent these whole we illegitimate systems of alternative just as i really do think does the work of our enemies for them michael to what extent do you think that during that time that you were in afghanistan in iraq if we had devoted the same level of resources and personnel to solve the real problems in the united states to educating our young people to providing jobs to

people to making sure that poverty was reduced. we would have a different and. we would be have a very having a very different conversation right now about the nature of terrorism and and that we might not even be facing or and we might be facing worse i don't know. of a quote domestic threat to the question i think. i mean to be clear i mean i think we went into afghanistan in response to a very clear threat in a very very clear action and i think any theory that we in some way initiated the series of events that brought down the twin towers that again i hope we all know i hope that was not implicit my had no course not put it but i think going into afghanistan was a necessary act i think what we've learned is a lot of tough lessons in spite of the courage sacrifice and i think very honorable service of a large number of people in iraq afghanistan here at home and in our intelligence agencies that. the methods we've used have not always been the right tactics that

sometimes to go after a small nimble globalized network your best bet is to deploy a small number globalized network of your own and that's that's worked fairly well for us fighting large land wars. counterinsurgency campaigns involving lots of people hundreds of thousands of soldiers in some cases has not been as effective. a tool as a set of tactics to use iraq is a very different we've talked about iraq before i was against it before it happened and wrote about that then in an abject lesson in how it was so going to troll the military worked one up going there myself and serving because i agreed to follow the orders of the chief i think iraq was a strategic blunder that's cost us incredibly dearly and i think it prolonged this conflict against the al qaeda network unnecessarily for quite a long time we would be in a very different position with regard to that network and our national security really large and we not done that we have to we have to wrap this up with this

conversation could go on and hopefully will again for some considerable period thank you thank you all. to see this bigger picture discussion on national security again go to our web site of conversations with great minds. and that's the way it is tonight friday april nineteenth two thousand and thirteen for more information check out our website dot com free speech org. and who would slash in the big picture and don't forget democracy begins when you get out there and get active your.

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from your about international airport in the very heart of moscow. welcome to the kaiser report imax guys are. there's you ever get the feeling that

nobody actually knows what they're talking about that politicians central bankers and unelected bureaucrats are just talking out of the bottle it appears you're right they've just been making it all up stacey max when you look out across the world and we've had this financial collapse one thing you've noticed the response that unifies all our western nations is austerity make the people pay for their sovereign debt crimes that were not sovereign debt crimes first but were financial debt crimes second first of all so there's been a big little hoops this week reinhart and rogoff yes we made a microsoft excel blunder in our debt study and it makes a notable difference so this is common reinhart and ken rogoff and they wrote a book which is now basically the policy template for.